Merriam-Webster Adds "Selfie," "Hashtag," and "Catfish" to the Dictionary

Cue old people getting angry.

By
Eliza Thompson

May 20, 2014

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

In a move designed to thrill millennials and send their parents into fits of "back in my day" rage, Merriam-Webster announced on Monday that words including "selfie," "baby bump," "tweep," and "hashtag" have been added to the collegiate dictionary. "Catfish" got an update to reflect its new usage as "a person who sets up a false personal profile on a social networking site for fraudulent or deceptive purposes." Your grandma is probably so mad right now.

Merriam-Webster defined "selfie" as "an image of oneself taken by oneself using a digital camera especially for posting on social networks," which not to quibble, but seems slightly incomplete. Most people use a phone to take selfies, which comes with a digital camera but is not a digital camera itself. Nobody ever said, "Let me just get the digital camera function of my phone out to take a selfie." The phone is a necessary component!

For those of you worried about the decay of the English language, take comfort in the fact that these words have not yet been added to the Oxford English Dictionary, largely regarded as "the better one." Though the OED named "selfie" as the word of the year in 2013 and added it to the Oxford Dictionaries Online, it's still not in the super-official one that's so big it comes in multiple volumes, meaning there's still time to stop future humans and their alien overlords from learning why everybody was making duck faces into their oddly large communication devices back in the olden days of 2014.